I've gotten very lazy about research ... I am exposed .... hrrmmm ...... Slayer, to me, departs from traditional lyric structures, it's what, as much as completely changing the sound of a style of music to create a new genre in entirety, as did a somewhat similar artist Mercyful Fate/King Diamond. Their descriptions of mindsets, yes gory details of actions, plots, concepts and chapters, musical novels in the latter's case, rapidfire words spit out in tangles of barbed, raw, undisciplined intellectual rage (yes read the lyrics closely, Slayer speaks from a place well above the grunts and thuds of the previous studs and leather purveyors of the form, maybe informal, not precisely educated, but it comes from an intuitive place, something already manifest without help from institutions of higher learning so called, however dubious that binding and restrictive learning process may ultimately prove out to be) driving home social, psychological, spiritual and other horrors, stories that scream the fears that most people are still reticent about voicing ....King Diamond is more shock rock, but he spins tales that read like a novel, in rhyme, well-read even without musical accompaniment ..... still, his thoughts about psychology and religion bleed into the stark word-pictures that burn the images into memory, now and forever, well actually, hopefully forever....